Every time you write. Every message you type. Every post you
like. Everything you write. They are watching you. An accurate message,
fittingly originated by The Police, translated to 2014, when it is no longer
just a vaguely creepy wedding song but a disturbing reality of life in the
digital age. The whole world is online, and whoever you are on the Internet,
for all intents and purposes, is who you are.

When you click on a link or visit a site, you are logging
information about who you are, who you will be, and who you wish you were. To
have access to that information would be to have power – the ability to control
all the versions of you that exist. We already know this on some intuitive
level, and it is the tradeoff we make to enjoy the convenience of the online
world.

Of course Google knows everything for which we have ever
searched. Of course dating websites know intimate details about the ways we
love. Of course Facebook is an experiment in culture on a scale the likes of
which social scientists could never have dreamed. These are acceptable risks.
We bury them and move on. But, where is the line?

We now know that the U.S. government and the National
Security Agency in particular have had access to all of it – our phones, our
computers, our lives – since at least Sept. 11, 2001. Out of fear, we agreed to
allow those who protect us nearly unlimited power to find the monsters, but
instead of checking for bogeymen under the bed, they were lifting our covers to
see if we were the threat. If we cannot draw a line there, then maybe we do not
believe in lines.

The new documentary from Laura Poitras, Citizenfour, explores the extent of the government’s spy programs
through the eyes of the man who brought it all to light – Edward Snowden. He is
infamous now. Snowden is a traitor, a hero, a pariah, a patriot. He is the man
we saw dissected on the news while the real story passed by us. He is the
beating heart at the center of Poitras’ dense political thriller, which tells a
story that would be implausible if we did not already know that it is true.

Poitras is the director behind two great Iraq War
documentaries, the Oscar-nominated My
Country, My Country and The Oath,
which landed her on the government’s watchlist. She moved to Berlin and began
work on a film about American surveillance programs. Then, she began receiving
the emails. Cryptic, mostly coded messages with the promise of blowing the lid
off U.S. post-9/11 spying, they were signed “Citizenfour.” Snowden was
contacting her.

Working through the paranoia and around the surveillance
under which they would both live, Poitras and Snowden met in Hong Kong. For
more than a week, they sat in a hotel room, and she filmed Snowden covering
everything from his past and his hopes for the future to the staggering scope
of the U.S. government’s intrusion into citizens’ lives.

These interviews make up the bulk of the film’s runtime, but
rather than bogging down the proceedings as talking-head sequences so often do,
they play as the riveting confessionals of an unknown man who knows he is about
to become public enemy No. 1. Sitting in with Poitras are the journalists who would
get credit for breaking one of the biggest stories of our time. They are Glenn
Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill.

Snowden is clearly putting himself and his family at
tremendous risk by releasing his privileged information, but so are those
documenting his journey and telling his story. As a journalist, it is hard not
to sit in awe of the murderer’s row of investigative reporters assembled for
this movie. For me, this is what the best reporting is about: digging deeper
than anyone has cared to look and uncovering the things no one wanted to see.

Greenwald is a particularly impressive man, whom Snowden
recommended Poitras bring on board. Dedicated to comprehending the full weight
of what Snowden is revealing, Greenwald becomes a stand-in for the audience –
as any good journalist should. Snowden has lived with these facts of life for a
long time, but these revelations are mostly new to Greenwald and to us. His
shock is our shock.

Your viewing of this film and your ultimate feelings toward
it will probably depend on what you think of Snowden and his actions. Poitras
knows this, and despite her subject’s protestations that he is not the story,
she goes to great lengths to put Snowden’s whistleblowing in the context of his
own life and struggles as much as the world at large.

Indeed, some of the film’s most powerful images are of
Snowden sitting in his hotel room and watching the fallout of what we now call
the “NSA leak.” More powerful still are the silent moments of Snowden staring
out the window of his room. Here is a man who has brought the whole world down
on himself. When he stares at an adjacent building, every window on every floor
poses a threat, as do each passing car and every unknown face. Paranoia is a
life sentence.

At the end of the day, though, this film is not about
Snowden or Greenwald or Poitras. It is about all of us. The end of privacy is
the end of liberty. Consider the Arab Spring of a few years back. Using the
social media tools at their disposal to organize, they gathered in the streets
and gave a voice to an opposition movement so long forced underground and into
silence. The world watched. The government’s response was to shut down the
Internet to try to prevent future demonstrations.

It would be hard to invent two more diametrically opposed
ideologies: the people freely exchanging ideas and exercising their right to
gather and a brutal, dictatorial regime trying to deny the rights of those people.
Some have suggested such things could never happen here, and to an extent, they
are right. But, the final question of Citizenfour
is: If the U.S. government knows where you gather, who was with you, and what
you said, is it any better?

The first one through the wall always gets bloody, but Snowden
did what he did because this is not the America he signed up to protect. His
hope is that others will follow him through the wall. Liberal, conservative, or
independent, when the elected no longer bow to the will of the voters, that is
a government that has outlived its usefulness. Maybe, despite this, you still
think the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, or perhaps you think
American exceptionalism is a crumbling myth. Either way, we should all be
better than this.